The GEO Checklist: 14 Things That Get You Cited by AI

Open every page and every H2 section with the direct answer. Not context, not a preamble, not a story about why the topic matters.

Models extract passages. A passage that contains the complete answer can be lifted and cited. A passage that sets up an answer arriving three paragraphs later cannot.

The test: delete everything except your opening two sentences. Does what remains answer the question a reader typed?

Specific figures get cited far more than qualitative claims. “Significantly faster” is unquotable. “Cut load time from 4.1s to 1.3s” is quotable.

If you have no number, that is a content problem, not a formatting problem. Go get one. Run the test, audit the accounts, count the thing.

Not “Implementation Considerations.” Try “How long does it take to implement?”

Your headings become the retrieval anchors. Match them to real query phrasing and the extraction gets easier for the model.

One tight paragraph that answers the page’s core question completely, before any subheading. This is the single highest-leverage change on most pages and it takes ten minutes.

Your company name, what you do, your location and your key claims must be identical across your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, your directory listings and any store listing you have.

Models cross-reference. Contradictions between sources create uncertainty, and uncertainty is a reason to cite someone else instead.

Quick audit: search your brand name in ChatGPT and ask it to describe your business. Whatever it gets wrong is what is inconsistent somewhere.

Organization, Article, FAQPage and Product where applicable. Fill the properties honestly.

Two rules matter more than the markup itself: never mark up content that is not visible on the page, and never publish review schema for reviews you do not have. Both are the kind of thing that costs you trust for years to save you a week.

Anonymous or generic bylines underperform. A named author with a linked profile, real credentials and a body of published work outperforms, and a large majority of top-ranking pages now carry detailed author bios.

An author box with a stock photo and a two-line generic bio is not the point. Verifiability is. Link to something external that confirms the person exists and knows the subject.

Perplexity in particular rewards freshness. But changing a date without changing the content is a bad idea, because models and readers both compare.

Update genuinely, then update the date.

Use real <ul>, <ol> and <table> markup rather than styled divs or paragraph text with dashes. Comparison tables get extracted well when they are actual tables.

Each section should make sense if lifted out of the page alone. Avoid opening a section with “As mentioned above” or “Building on this”, because that passage becomes useless the moment it is extracted.

This is the one that actually moves things, and it is the one most people skip because it is work.

Original data from a survey you ran. A case study with real numbers from real client work. An audit of a sample of accounts. A framing nobody else used. Write the “when this is the wrong answer” post instead of another “what is” post.

One original data point outperforms twenty rewrites. If your page could be assembled from the top five results, models have no reason to prefer it.

Narrow, expert destinations are outperforming broad shallow sites. Cover every angle and sub-topic of one thing before you start a second thing.

Counterintuitive, but these outperform top-of-funnel guides for AI-referred traffic. Bottom-of-funnel pages get cited when someone asks a buying question, and buying questions are where the revenue is.

Most agencies hide pricing. That is a citation you are handing to a competitor.

AI systems weight how often and how consistently your brand is discussed across the web. Unlinked mentions count. Podcast appearances, community answers, guest pieces, being quoted in someone else’s article. All of it feeds the same signal.